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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump says Obamacare is broken. Hes the one who broke it.
Trump says Obamacare is broken. Hes the one who broke it.By Jonathan Gruber May 5 at 7:38 PM
The primary rallying cry for this weeks passage of the American Health Care Act was the claim that the Affordable Care Act was imploding. Republicans argued the rapidity and lack of clarity with which this radical bill passed the House was necessary given how quickly the ACA was falling apart. They cited as evidence the recent large premium increases and the growing number of counties with no insurers.
What supporters of the AHCA are not admitting, however, is that the ACAs current failings are due to the misguided policies of Republicans and particularly the Trump administration. Before Donald Trump was elected, there were no places in the country where individuals could not buy insurance on the exchanges.
And then Trump took office. Since his first days as president, the new administration has undertaken repeated actions to undermine the ACA.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-says-obamacare-is-broken-hes-the-one-who-broke-it/2017/05/05/29434658-31b7-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.html
dalton99a
(81,486 posts)Mr. Ected
(9,670 posts)When the ACA was rolled out, telling insurance companies that they had to insure anybody who signed up, regardless of previous conditions or sickness, everybody realized that the insurance companies would probably lose money in the first decade or so, until previously-uninsured-but-sick people got into the system, got better, and things evened out.
To get the insurance companies to go along with this danger of losing money, the ACA promised to make them whole for any losses in any of the first decades years. At the end of each fiscal year, the insurance companies merely had to document their losses, and the government would reimburse them out of ACA funds provided for by the law.
The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the risk corridor, and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole. And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obamas signature health law.
Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that hed saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/22/how-republicans-quietly-sabotaged-obamacare-long-before-trump-came-into-office_partner/
Cha
(297,220 posts)workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)I mean, how damn stupid can we be, huh?
Republicans will bankrupt us and then kill us for lack of health care, reversing everything the democratic party put in place to help us.
Any questions America????
Cha
(297,220 posts)Dulcinea
(6,631 posts)I teach ESL. I know quite a few people who teach part-time in various schools, but the bulk of their income comes from private tutoring. The ACA is how they get affordable health insurance for themselves & their families. They're not takers, lazy, entitled, or any of the other stupid buzzwords right-wingers like to use!
luvMIdog
(2,533 posts)vlyons
(10,252 posts)All that Republican talk about Obamacare being in a death spiral, and insurance companies pulling was intentionally planned and caused by Republicans - especially Marco Rubio.
A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obamas signature health law.
The attack stems from two years of effort by Senator Marco Rubio and others in Congress to undermine a key financing mechanism in the law. So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.
Mr. Rubios efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the health law have hardly risen to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-obamacare-affordable-care-act.html
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,001 posts)dlk
(11,566 posts)Is there even one thing Trump is truthful about?
vlyons
(10,252 posts)n/t